How To Keep Your Promises

Building trust based relationships, either professional or personal, is a really big thing. It can propel your career or your life if you can do it, and it can sink them if you can’t. I believe that one of the most important ingredients for building these kinds of relationships is keeping your promises.

When you consistently keep you promises, you essentially align what you say you will do with what you truly do, and people know that they can rely on you. This is of course, easier said than done. Here are some of they key points I discovered can help you visibly improve the rate of promises you keep.

1. Acknowledge your slip-ups in this area. Counter-intuitively, most people often break their promises because they believe they are very good at keeping their promises. This inaccurate self-image creates a huge blind spot, which does not allow them to notice the situations when they don’t keep their promises, so they can’t really address them.

This is why a good starting point is to assume that you often break you promises, and to start consciously looking at they way you relate to other people, to notice when this is the case. As you start looking for these slipups, you will start to see them. Getting awareness about when they manifest, with whom, is the first big step in getting rid of them.

2. Think twice before you promise. It’s funny how a lot of people have problems related to lack of self-confidence, but when in comes to making promises, they have the opposite kind: they’re over-confident in what they can do, and they promise too much. Braking promises is usually not the result of bad intent; it is the result of this.

It’s very important that you realize you have limited time, energy, skills and resources, and as much as you would like to, you probably can’t do it all. Keep this in mind every time you’re getting ready to promise something, and ask yourself: “Can I really keep this promise I want to make?” If the answer is not a definite “yes”, then don’t make that promise. Instead, promise something less, something different, or don’t promise at all.

3. Learn to say no. One thing I’ve realized is that often, we sort of trap ourselves into promising more than we can or we want to do, because we have a problem with saying no. Someone asks us for some help, we know they have high expectations of us, and we just can’t make ourselves emotionally to betray those expectations, by saying no.

To get this handled, there is a very important mental leap you must take: to realize that you can’t and you don’t have to please everybody. When you fully embrace this idea, you feel more freedom to not live to everybody’s expectations, and to not be there for everybody. Which makes it easier for you to resist from making promises you can’t or don’t want to fulfill.

4. Make slipups meaningful for you. When people break a promise, even if they do realize this, they often quickly forget about it and as a result, this experience does nothing to enforce their tendency to keep promises. It’s easy to keep saying one thing and doing another, when your mind thinks it’s no problem.

This is the reason why if you want to drastically increase you promise keeping rate, you need to change this thinking. You need to make slipups a visible moral mistake in your head, which you completely acknowledge, to yourself and others involved. And to do this, you make integrity and keeping your promises a top value for yourself. You decide it to be very important for you.

Keeping promises and having integrity sound like things which are easy to master. But they are actually some of the hardest people skills to master. As you consciously and systemically work at improving your promise keeping skills, you will see some impressive changes in the quality of your relationships.

Eduard Ezeanu is a communication coach with an attitude-based approach. He teaches people how to put their best foot forward in communication and get top notch results. He also writes on his blog, People Skills Decoded.

I have found that being trustworthy is an important part of your personal character. It has the capability to build great relationships and enhance performance in your career. But being untrustworthy has some severe negative effects. I learned the hard way. Do you trust me? Thank you for sharing important tips for self development.

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Eduard,

That is some really practical advice. Good article. I specially endorse thinking twice before promising.

http://warriormindcoach.com/blog Gregg Swanson

Hi Eduard, great info on your post! In addition to your points I’ve found that the first person we need to keep our promises is to ourselves. How many times have we said we’re going to do something like exercising, cleaning out the garage or setting a goal? If we begin to keep the promise we make to ourselves, then it will be easy to keep the promises we make to others. Of course keeping our own promises takes focus and mental strength. And we begin to keep our promises they build on each other and are easier to keep. Thanks for the helpful tips!

http://thezero2hero.blogspot.com/ Timothy Shaw

Hey there! First time reader, I’m just getting in to the self development type blogs, this looks like a great one I will be coming back

I liked this post, especially #2 and #3. A huge shift I made with promises is when I learned to say no more often. It’s so easy to feel pressure to say yes to everything but once you do it you realize “hey, people aren’t so pissed as I thought they might be!” and you have a lot more freedom. Promises are great, it’s just too many/for things you don’t care about that become a problem…

Oh my gosh…this is EXACTLY what my dad and I wrote our book about. It was just published this January; it’s on Amazon.com – called, “The Promise Doctrine.”

Thanks for writing something so inspirational to me.

http://www.myrelationshipguy.com/trainingreno Guy Farmer

Thank you Eduard. I’ve found that we tend to promise too much and then try to hide stuff when we can’t do it. People will actually avoid each other rather than admitting that they promised too much. Luckily, your advice will help people realize that you really don’t have to promise a lot of things for people to hold you in high regard. This insight helps us stop promising to do things we don’t want to do and frees us up to focus on things we actually can deliver.

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Eduard,
Thanks for laying this out. One aspect that we often overlook are the promises that we make to ourselves. And when we don’t keep the promises that we make to ourselves, we break trust with ourselves… starting a downward spiral.

Your remedies can break that when we start honoring our promises to ourselves, as well as others.

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point 2 and 3 are the best explained

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